local media insider

Inside Jobs: The mastermind is still teaching local media about itself

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It was 9 p.m. inside a industrial warehouse in Las Vegas, when the first people in Nevada tried to lay-out the page of an actual newspaper on a Macintosh computer.

I was 20-something and the Apple sales representative from Century 23 Computers was acting as my IT director. He showed up with the computers and printers in his pick-up and set them up on a folding table - the kind used for registrations at fundraisors - in the middle of the room.

We could not actually place the ads yet - that would wait for, I think, InDesign, and by then, who remembers. But the thrill...

No one else had put out a newspaper this way, not in Nevada. Not even the Review Journal!

Thus, twenty years later, I find it impossible to separate my career from the influence of Apple and the man who lead the company towards the obvious, that no one else was able to see. .

And we are now trying to figure out how to publish on iPad, and to understand things like eyes and fingers, as if for the first time. As one top executive put it to me recently, redesigning for the iPad, "The mouse is a precision instrument, the fat finger isn't."

So given a touch screen, drop down windows on navigation bars may no longer be efficient.

Wall Street exectuives may still cling to their blackberries, texting faster than ever, but for most consumers - and for people who move words around in the publishing buisness - have a special connection with the visual world in which moving things by touch satisfies a desire they never knew they had.

It's the difference, between, classical geometry which relies on straight lines of linear geometric thought, and, say, fractiles: infinite equations, non-repeating, which via computer form pictures. The messiness of nature hid a its astounding visual logic in plain sight.

The real scientists insisted for a while that what had gone unseen was still largely irrelevant, even though - and perhaps because of - the fact that it described, basically all of the naturally world.

What more, you can see self-similar patterns without computers, they are everywhere, from blood veins to cloud patterns, from tree limbs to coastlines.

In a similar fashion, we struggle as publsihers to accept visual funcitionality that is required to understand publishing today. Our most basic mistakes are in how people visually use the information that we create. How they look, fell, touch and move through the media we produce.

Jobs may have moved on to another phase in his own life. But we will be catching up to him for a long time to come.